How to follow a discussion these days?

Back in 2005/ 2006 there was a blog as a linear stream of ideas written by – in most cases – a single blogger. Given the blog was open for trackbacks and comments one was able to follow all reactions by subscribing to a simple chronological string of ideas. There was that one place where the discussion was hosted and linked together.

Here comes the Twitterification, friendfeeding, and network socialization of macro and micro publishing in 2007/ 2008: Harald Taglinger published an entry here on the multi-author morphem last week. As I am an author as well and automatically feed the blog as a whole to my friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo profiles – amongst others – Ben Loos comes across the post and comments Harald T’s entry on my (Harald F’s) Plaxo account (cp. above). Let me close the circle by reposting it here.

The question arises: Who else is contributing to the discussion? Maybe someone saw the post shared via one author’s friendfeed and left a comment there, being dugg by a third person and shouted to a friend who shared with a comment on Google Reader to be Pownced, Multiplied, Twittered, and Sphered?

Difficult and chaotic times we live in. As we always did. Remember how hell broke loose when the printing press was invented?

What is the solution?

[Update: Just to make sure that everyone noticing the new screenshot on my flickr photostream can go back to this post, I added a link from flickr to morphem there. As Ted Nelson put it: "HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT - ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins."]